News: Research Highlights

Techniques developed in AMO physics has long served as foundations for various imaging modalities in chemistry and biology. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one such example: through the mapping of proton nuclear spin resonances under the magnetic field gradient, MRI enables both structural and functional imaging of our bodies in an unprecedented detail. Magnetometry using...

It is generally believed that superconductivity only weakly affects the indirect exchange between magnetic impurities. If the distance r between impurities is smaller than the superconducting coherence length (), this exchange is thought to be dominated by RKKY interactions, identical to those in a normal metallic host. This perception is based on a perturbative treatment...

The internal structure and the long-range dipole-dipole interactions of ultracold polar molecules open new avenues in studying physics such as the quantum simulation of strongly correlated Hamiltonians, ultracold controlled chemistry or precision measurements. At present, a reliable general method to produce an ultracold sample of molecules is desired, but not available. The goal of this...

The development of precise atomic clocks has led to many scientific and technological advances that play an increasingly important role in modern society. Shared timing information constitutes a key resource for positioning and navigation with a direct correspondence between timing accuracy and precision in applications such as the Global Positioning System (GPS). By combining precision...

We considered strongly interacting systems of effective spins, subject to dissipative spin-flip processes associated with optical pumping. We predicted the existence of novel magnetic phases in the steady state of that system, which emerged due to the competition between coherent and dissipative processes. Specifically, for strongly anisotropic spin-spin interactions, we found ferromagnetic, antiferromagnetic, spin-densitywave, and...

We considered two approaches to dark-spin-mediated quantum computing in hybrid solid-state spin architectures. First, we reviewed the notion of eigenmode-mediated unpolarized spin-chain state transfer and extended the analysis to various experimentally relevant imperfections: quenched disorder, dynamical decoherence, and uncompensated long-range coupling. In finite-length chains, the interplay between disorder-induced localization and decoherence yielded a natural optimal...

We showed that it was possible to realize significant nonlinear optical interactions at the few photon level in graphene nanostructures. Our approach took advantage of the electric field enhancement associated with the strong confinement of graphene plasmons and the large intrinsic nonlinearity of graphene. Such a system could provide a powerful platform for quantum nonlinear...

Topological excitations are found throughout nature, in proteins and DNA, as dislocations in crystals, as vortices and solitons in superfluids and superconductors, and generally in the wake of symmetry-breaking phase transitions. In fermionic systems, topological defects may provide bound states for fermions that often play a crucial role for the system’s transport properties. Famous examples...

The coupling of the spin of electrons to their motional state lies at the heart of recently discovered topological phases of matter. Here we create and detect spin-orbit coupling in an atomic Fermi gas, a highly controllable form of quantum degenerate matter. We reveal the spin-orbit gap via spin-injection spectroscopy, which characterizes the energy-momentum dispersion...